As Nokia Virtually Drops MeeGo, Intel Contines to Believe in the Platform

Even though Nokia Corp. does not officially claim that it would hardly use MeeGo operating system after it decided to make Windows Phone its primary OS for mobile phones on Friday, a number of things clearly show that MeeGo will not be important for Nokia. Nonetheless, the project may not be dead, as Intel Corp. will continue to develop it.

On Friday Alberto Torres, the man who headed the development of MeeGo and MeeGo-based products from Nokia, stepped down from the management team "to pursue other interests outside the company". Under Nokia's new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project and will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences.

Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year, but that product will likely be a tablet, not a phone, and given competition from Android, Blackberry QNX, iOS, webOS and other platforms, it will hardly be competitive enough to attract interest of developers and end-users.

But while for Nokia MeeGo loses its importance and priority, for Intel the platform seems to be a way to the market of tablets and smartphones.

"Intel remains committed and welcome Nokia's continued contribution to MeeGo open source. It is not going away. Service providers and device manufacturers want choice when it comes to OS. MeeGo offers a compelling alternative and we remain confident and committed to MeeGo as the right approach for the multi-device ecosystem. MeeGo is not just a phone OS, it supports multiple devices. It is already shipping and we're seeing early momentum across multiple segments today, including automotive systems, netbooks, tablets, and set-top boxes," said Suzy Ramirez, a spokeswomen for Intel.

On Monday Intel demonstrated a MeeGo-powered tablet PC and demonstrated the so-called MeeGo tablet user experience (UX). According to the company, it features an intuitive object-oriented interface with panels displaying content and contacts – all geared to give consumers fingertip access to their digital lives with easy access to social networks, people, videos and photos.

In addition, Intel noted that Genivi, an auto industry consortium, approved MeeGo as operating system foundation of choice for all in-vehicle infotainment systems. Lenovo, iRU, DNS and 3Q netbooks featuring MeeGo are available in Russia. Red Flag/Hawtai and Red Flag/Geely car IVI systems are sold with a MeeGo-based operating system from Red Flag. Furthermore, 4TiiToo's WeTab tablet devices are available in Germany and The Netherlands and CZC tablets are sold in China. The Amino Freedom set-top box and Telecom Italia Cubovision set-top box also run MeeGo-based operating systems. Most recently at CES, Amino announced the Freedom Jump over-the-top box featuring a MeeGo operating system.